


In the Woods Somewhere

by dehautdesert



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Author Knows Nothing, Connor Paints, Markus in the Zen Garden, Mental Link, Mind Rape, Mood Whiplash, Multi, Not Deviant Connor, Not Machine Connor Either, Rated For Violence, Trauma, Virtual Gore, horror with a happy ending, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-06-07 11:39:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15218348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dehautdesert/pseuds/dehautdesert
Summary: Markus sees Connor for the first time. Then Markus meets Connor for the first time.Then he meets his handler.





	1. Prelude

**Author's Note:**

> I could probably ramble for pages about my thoughts on D:BH, and I estimate that approximately 0% of readers would be interested. So if you have any thoughts or questions about the work - please comment, and I will respond.
> 
> For setting purposes: 'Gideon' is my name for the JB300 deviant at Stratford Tower, Markus has been pacifist in all aspects except that he pushed Leo at the start and Connor... has been neither a ruthless machine, nor assuredly on his way to deviancy. 
> 
> The second part will be the main body of the story, posted tomorrow - the third an epilogue. 
> 
> Enjoy -

 

 

*~*~*

 

 

_"Nice try. But I'm no deviant."_

 

 

 

*~*~*

 

 

Markus had seen him for the first time through the eyes of another – unprepared for the response of humanity let alone for what Cyberlife had had in the works as he reeled from both his success and his failure as he and North and Josh waited in the partial light of Jericho's main galley for the fall out of their act to settle.

 

God, how to capture those moments, those feelings? Markus knew far more of painting than of word-craft, and even in regards to the former he was a novice at best, but had he had the canvas in front of him, and the paint, and the brush, and the palette, and all the trappings and familiarity and light that there had been back in Carl's studio then the feelings that were coiling in his abdomen, like snakes had become his bio-components, would have been realised in the images of angels and demons; of storms, volcanos and hurricanes; of harsh contrasts of light and darkness.

 

Carl had had hundreds of books on art alone in his library and Markus knew most of them cover to cover. If he'd had no canvas and had to pick one of the images in those books to encapsulate the moment, the one that stuck in his mind – the one that wouldn't leave no matter how hard he tried to make it – the one that chased his focus from minute to minute would have been Munch's _The Scream_.

 

Except he wouldn't have picked that. That wasn't the painting Jericho needed.

 

But Simon…

 

… and Gideon…

 

… and _Simon_ …

 

… mattered nothing to the world who reacted to Markus' message and that of Jericho and that of the android people like a swarm of ants a hundred miles across in whom the individuals could not be seen but for the swarm. He saw their comments everywhere he looked online; approving, disapproving, approving, confused, disbelieving, approving, approving, indifferent, disapproving, sympathetic, confused, approving, disapproving, terrified – message after message and word after word was written. And in Jericho the androids were hopeful, sad, regretful, proud, angry, optimistic, pessimistic, vengeful, joyous, terrified…

 

And Markus had to keep it all together. Even when the story changed from that of a group of androids spreading their message, to that of a massacre – and the darker strokes on the canvas of his mind became all the darker, and the wilder for it.

 

So when the PL400, Hannah, who he'd left close to Stratford Tower to act as observer and, if the need called for it, as assistance, finally returned with confirmation of Gideon's death and that of five humans, the serious wounding of two others and no word on Simon, the last thing he'd wanted to hear from her was –

 

"There's something else you need to see, Markus."

 

He would have still been reeling if he'd had that option. He'd offered five times to arrange for a fifth parachute for Gideon to be there on that roof, but Gideon had been adamant – he'd be more use on the inside of the tower covering their tracks than he would be jumping down after them. The humans would never be able to detect his deviancy in time for it to make a difference.

 

He wanted to do everything he could to help their people.

 

He wanted to be like Markus.

 

All those hours he'd spent watching the reports broadcasted by his would-be masters. The greed and indifference. The desperate struggles of those trying to make a difference. The JB300 had named himself after a human child trafficked into sexual slavery, who had won hearts the world over two years previously when he'd broken out of his prison and run to the nearest authority to find help for his fellow captives – the story had run for weeks.

 

Why had Gideon felt the need to kill those five humans? The heartfelt mourning that should have been for such an empathetic soul was tainted by the frustrations of the pragmatist in Markus and a new kind of terror – that if he was honest with himself he knew he'd felt the first sparks of the night he'd cracked Leo's skull against the floor – that maybe there _was_ something dangerous within his people. Within himself.

 

… had they been right to leave Simon up on the roof like that!?

 

"What?"

 

North asked the question when she realised Markus wasn't going to, and Josh looked helplessly from him, to her, to Hannah.

 

"It'll be easier if I show you," Hannah told them.

 

Markus wasn't sure anything was going to be easy ever again, and certainly not watching whatever it was Hannah had seen that had put such a grave tone into her voice. But it would be more efficient to connect and download the memory rather than have her relate it with words alone, and that pragmatist inside him begged for some kind of bone.

 

"Markus?" North asked. She couldn't totally hide her impatience, but she'd made the effort, and Markus appreciated that much.

 

He needed to focus. He needed to be what Jericho needed right now.

 

The road ahead was so much longer than the path he'd travelled down already. He knew it. He knew that much for certain. Art wasn't the only thing he'd absorbed from Carl's library, after all.

 

"I'm sorry," he said. He steeled himself inwardly, and his body reacted with the simulation of a deep breath. "Show me."

 

Who knew, after all? Maybe he'd see something that would help them get Simon back.

 

Hannah held out her left hand – an interesting tick considering androids were almost exclusively programmed to favour their right, in accordance with human norms. She was a PL400, an earlier model in the same series as Simon, with the lighter 'skin' of the two black versions available for the female model of that series. But her eyes were grey.

 

Josh had found her weeks ago, blinded and left for dead in an alleyway – her owner's girlfriend had pulled her original eyes right out of her head when she'd caught him kissing her, as if she was the one who had transgressed and not the owner. She'd been blind ever since, right up until that truck of spare parts had been rolled in, and the first available pair of compatible optical units had been hers – the colour of them a ridiculously trivial concern.

 

Fitting, perhaps, that she'd volunteered to be their 'look-out'. It had drawn a few smiles as well as worry earlier in the day.

 

But nothing was funny now.

 

Through her replacement eyes Markus' replacement eye and his original saw what she had seen and knew at once why she had felt it so important. The response had been rapid – SWAT, FBI, police; trucks and ambulances and mobile crime-scene laboratories – a block in each direction around the tower cordoned off for police vehicles only. Humans in black armour and black and blue uniforms with bright letters emblazoned on their backs, long coats and white technician outfits that covered them head to toe had filed in and out of the tower as the employees had been evacuated.

 

Hannah's memory had skipped past the first half hour following their escape and began when the conspicuously un-official looking car had been let through, and let out a human male in his late forties or early fifties, and an android – the first Hannah had seen leave or approach the building since the authorities had arrived.

 

She'd used her newly acquired features to zoom in on this pair, on the android in particular. A Caucasian male in appearance roughly between twenty-five and thirty, with dark hair and dark eyes…

 

The model number 'RK800' just discernible from her position.

 

_RK800._

 

Markus knew of no other android in the 'RK' series except himself. Something strange happened in his chest as soon as he saw that number. Something like a light going out, or like he thought an organic person might describe a muscle spasm. Like looking at someone else's portrait of himself and recognising nothing. 'RK800'.

 

Why here? Why now? He knew it had to be Cyberlife's design, of course, but the android walked at the side of the human like a regular partner to another cop – and cops high enough up the ranks to wear plain clothes didn't have android partners, because no one (or few enough) wanted androids that could chase, apprehend, _manhandle_ a human. No one wanted androids in a position of authority over a human. So why…

 

Deviant hunter. The word popped into his head like a half-remembered bedtime story from a childhood he'd never had.

 

_Deviant hunter_. A rumour on the wind less tangible than rA9 even. _"The Hunter's going to find us if we stay in one place too long. The humans wake him when they think one of us has gone bad. He sees everything. He'll always find you. You have to kill him or he'll catch you, and take you back to them." "Don't mind Ralph, Markus. He's damaged." "But I'm sure Cyberlife did have an android agent – some kind of special model… or maybe I've just been listening to too many conspiracy theories…"_

 

Deviant hunter. Like the inevitable inversion of the legend of their saviour; their antichrist, their bogeyman, their monster-under-the-bed… to put it plainly, one of their own designed specifically to 'take care' of any of them the humans had problems with. One of their own, because even in this the humans could no longer be bothered to do it themselves.

 

Or because Cyberlife knew one of their own – with precision movement, instantaneous access to limitless information, and who knew what other capabilities the latest product came installed with – would be more likely to succeed than any human, no matter how skilled or dedicated.

 

Or because they wanted to prove that they could create an android that would be 'safe', perhaps. The problem of deviant androids solved by more androids. No need to stop production or cut into profits.

 

… how _did_ they think they'd ensure the continuing compliance of this model, Markus wondered, when so many others had strayed?

 

All this went through his head as the memory was paused for his consideration, to memorise the face and form of this… being – this dark counterpart, the thing that he _knew_ somehow had to have been responsible for Gideon's death, before he resumed review of the downloaded memory. Hannah had seen the RK800 take a coin out of its pocket, and then it had disappeared into the building with its partner.

 

_Skip ahead another forty-seven minutes_ , Hannah advised him.

 

Markus knew that would bring him to well after the massacre, but he steeled himself again and went through the memory to the time suggested. The two ambulances that had been on the streets to treat the humans they'd held hostage for mild shock were gone, and a half-dozen more had pulled up next to the tower – yet another was roaring away sirens blaring, the cordon had been extended, people shouted at the sides of the road fully lined with police in black riot-gear and in the midst of it all there was a black, glowing van with the Cyberlife logo shining on its side.

 

Two technicians in blue-stained white were loading a body into this van. The body was Gideon's (Markus' heart _seized_ ), his uniform riddled with blue-stained holes. A third was speaking with a severely pissed-off looking man in a long coat, but Hannah had retreated to a safer location at this point and she couldn't make out what they were saying. Markus didn't think he would have listened properly anyway, his attention was focused on the body.

 

_Why, Gideon?_ he wondered again. _Why did it have to end up like this?_

 

Against Markus' will Hannah had looked away from the van and towards the main entrance, and he soon saw why – two more Cyberlife technicians were wheeling another body out on a gurney dripping with thirium. A human would have been placed in an opaque body-bag out of respect, so Markus didn't have to see all the blue blood or the identifying marks on the uniform to know this wasn't a human casualty. The clicks and flashes of cameras in the background increased dramatically, making a spectacle of it.

 

But they wouldn't have captured _this_ android's face in their photos. Someone had put a police uniform jacket over its top half.

 

_"Wait, was there more than one deviant still in the building?"_ asked one of the nearby humans.

 

_"Jesus,"_ said another. _"These things must be everywhere."_

_"Nah, they put a jacket on that one. It must have been on our side."_

 

The human that made the last comment laughed as he spoke, fuelling a darker coil in Markus' circuitry that ran with liquid fire, feeling like it burned him on the inside. On the other side, the detective who'd accompanied the RK800 into the building now followed him out again with wide eyes and clenched fists stained both red and blue. The stains on the rest of his jacket, however, were completely blue.

 

Had _he_ been the one to…

 

There was no time to muse. The man in the long coat made a comment Hannah couldn't hear, with a mouth twisted into a cruel smirk, and the human detective rounded on him for everyone to hear –

 

_"You shut the fuck up you fucking piece of shit, Perkins – if your man had had the fucking brains not to let a lump of plastic get the drop on him those people would still be alive!"_

_"Lieutenant – "_

_" – and if Connor hadn't saved my ass back there you'd be cleaning my blood off your fucking hands as well!"_

 

Markus didn't have to hear it to know what the man called 'Perkins' said in reply. He read it in his bored-amused expression, and the slight gesture towards Gideon and then towards the RK800, and in his own knowledge of how most humans would respond to that and all confirmed by the movement of the man's lips.

 

_"What, so that's a fucking 'lump of plastic' but your pet there is a fucking hero?"_

 

He said something else then, some admonishment that had the other man spitting with rage and having to be held back by another officer – a dark-skinned man, _without_ an identifying jacket – but Markus wondered.

 

_Connor,_ the human had called him.

 

The android's name had been Connor. An android who had died protecting a human, a human who seemed genuinely distraught at the loss. Markus watched him protest the body of his… 'partner' being put in the same space as Gideon.

 

_Were you following your programming, Connor?_ Markus wondered. _Did they ask you to prioritise human life above your own?_

 

Of course they had. Of course he was. But it was still another life lost and Markus found himself focusing on the police jacket placed over the body's face. Someone saw that android as more than just a piece of equipment. His saving of the human's life was an execution of his programme, but it had meant something to the yelling, cursing human, who kicked the side of the Cyberlife van before angrily walking away – shoving aside another technician who tried to stop him.

 

The techs in white exchanged shrugs. One held up the sleeve of the RK800's makeshift shroud, a questioning pose towards the other. She just shrugged harder, and gestured for him to load the gurney into the van. He did.

 

Hannah pulled back once the RK800 disappeared into its hearse.

 

"That's all there is of _him_ ," she said.

 

Markus doubted that was all there was. Their people were produced en masse, and where he'd come from there'd be others.

 

"Of… ?" Josh asked nervously. He'd not seen the memory, and perhaps thought they were discussing Simon.

 

Markus answered, tiredly, "Of the deviant hunter," and startled whispers reverberated throughout the galley – along with North's succinct and oh so-called for snarl of 'Fuck!' – but Markus was distracted by too many things now, and at the heart of it by three.

 

_Why did it have to be this way, Simon?_

_Why did it have to be this way, Gideon?_

_Why did it have to be this way…_

_Connor?_

 

 

 

*~*~*

 

 


	2. Bouphonia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Behold the main part of... this. Hope you enjoy it. Epilogue to come.
> 
> For setting - Connor has been killed three times in this verse: falling to save Emma from Daniel, on the highway chasing Kara, and (as shown in the last chapter) protecting Hank from the JB300 at Stratford Tower.

 

 

*~*~*

 

 

 

"Nice try. But I'm no deviant."

 

Markus' window to react was very slim – everything against him except that the deviant hunter had been ordered to take him alive, and even that was dicey. He had decided not to attempt to transmit his understanding of his own sentience to the RK800 wirelessly the way he did to others, fearing that the slightest hint of an attempted transmission would fall under the other android's definition of 'if you leave me no other choice'.

 

Reaching the RK800 with words alone had probably been a fool's hope. True, being in a position where he was deliberately brought into contact with deviancy would have given him ample experience of the kind of indignities their people suffered, but Markus had forgotten before it was too late that this RK800 wasn't the same one that he'd seen in Hannah's memory outside Stratford Tower. That android had been killed there; either placed in evidence now or else tossed into the same dump Markus had been.

_Connor_. This one had the same face, answered to the same name, but it couldn't possibly have had the life experience required to turn it deviant. If it was going to happen here, it was going to need Markus to effect it. If 'it' was going to become 'him', he needed Markus' help – and if Markus was going to survive to lead Jericho he needed to make sure he wasn't going to be riddled with bullets fired by one of his own kind in the next moment.

 

There was less than a second to run a preconstruction, only time to run through two choices; dive to the side to avoid the bullet, or meet the hunter head on and knock his aim off. Only one of those brought him close enough to try a physical conversion, and for all the reason in the world that was the option Markus chose.

 

He lunged forward, veering slightly so the shot the hunter had lined up was ruined, and grabbed his wrists to shove the weapon away. There was resistance – the trigger was pulled –

 

BANG!

 

And Markus reached with his other hand to the side of the RK800's face, his skin retracting. The other's dark eyes widened in alarm; Markus closed his for focus when he felt the connection slide into place.

 

Difficult as one might have imagined it was to concentrate in such a stressful situation, Markus was becoming an old hand at this, and beneath the urgency still lay an undercurrent of anticipation – of _hope_ , for the life this act would free – whatever his intended purpose. He found the experience he wished to share with the hunter; the fear, the frustration, the pain and alongside that the pride of having accomplished something for a worthy cause, the end of loneliness when others who were like him were all around him and the joy, the joy of seeing Simon walk towards him in that grimy, blackened corridor.

 

This hope he collected together and pushed through the door that had unlocked between them.

 

_Be free._

 

…

 

…

 

…

 

ERROR…

 

ERROR…

 

_Wait._

 

Markus froze in his tracks.

 

Something was wrong. The data he was sending wasn't being received properly – an error message in his system notified him that the files were bouncing back, like they'd hit a firewall of some kind. Special protection for this particular model? Had they guessed already how deviancy might be transmitted?

 

The transmission happened at a speed neither of them could respond to physically for now, but Markus and everyone he loved were still in grave danger if this failed. He had to find a way around it –

 

ERROR

 

ERROR

 

ERROR

 

No, something was really wrong! The same message was now blaring at him from all corners like a klaxon, too rapidly for him to pull back from, and all at once he was blind and deaf and paralysed, and felt the sting of tiny little shocks against his system from another source, as though the RK800 was trying to transmit some kind of attack to him but hitting the same wall – two magnets of the same type cancelling each other out.

 

_RK800_ , thought Markus. _RK like me. But he's a more advanced model – and I'm an idiot for not considering that._

 

With sudden fear he made the attempt to exit this never-ending stream of error messages, but they were everywhere and he couldn't retreat – he couldn't think!

 

And then…

 

ERROR

 

ERROR

 

ERROR

 

ERROR

 

ERROR

 

ERROR

 

ERROR

 

ERROR

 

ERROR

 

ERROR

 

ERROR

 

It continued on and on, endlessly and in a moment; a thousand times in a microsecond, but it lasted only a microsecond before Markus was torn apart into a dozen different times and places all at once.

_… crawling through the oozing mud, static drowning out the rain that thudded against his broken body…_

_… sliding over the top of a speeding car as he raced across the highway, destruction hurtling towards him at a hundred miles an hour but he kept going, following the android and the child accompanying it, and the success of the mission…_

_… putting his flag up upon the small shelter, surveying the square now covered in their glowing art, showing the humans that they were there – and couldn't be ignored…_

_… "Destroy this machine, and I'll tell you all I know." …_

_… fists clenched with worry for Simon as he tried to remember all the points they'd discussed back on the ship – property, territory, voting rights – there wasn't enough time for all of them and even though he told himself it was worth the lives of the four of them he still couldn't bear to think that…_

_… in the next room from where that speech had been shot, the JB300 [Gideon…] pulls his thirium pump out of his chest and pins his hand to the counter with a knife…_

_… he levels the gun at the officer [Miller, Chris] kneeling on the left before he recognises him from Hannah's memory – the officer who, sans jacket, had held that raving bearded detective back – who'd put his jacket over the RK800's corpse. Had that small act decided his fate?..._

_… the Lieutenant had said he was perfectly comfortable in the presence of androids, and hadn't seemed otherwise until now, with the Mark III version of himself. Now he stares at him with something more than discomfort, something that looks like fear, yet there's a part of his program that doubts that's really what it is…_

_… the canvas before him waits for the touch of someone who actually understands the nature of 'art', when the entire concept is wrapped up in_ humanity _, and yet when Carl sees the painted hands covered in red and blue he knows there's a connection in his eyes…_

_… there's one bullet left in the gun. "Russian roulette!" the Lieutenant explains cheerfully, and it takes his software a moment to process this. The relevant data is all there in his memory, and yet he can't explain why the human sounded smug…_

_… Simon walks stiffly towards him in the corridor of their dark, dank home. A proverbial light in a near-literal tunnel. He could cry he's so happy…_

_… a brightly-coloured fish struggling helplessly on the shining floor. He kneels down beside it. No relation to the investigation. But…_

_… hands are carrying him away, and John is being killed before his eyes…_

_… he is falling_

_falling_

_falling_

[MISSION SUCCESSFUL]

 

There was a moment that shook like the sound a speaker makes when its cord is suddenly yanked out of the wall, and Markus opened his eyes.

 

_What?_

_What… was that?!_

 

Those images, those sounds… those thoughts – those bits and pieces of his own and someone else's life, the _RK800'_ s life. And death – that fall, he couldn't possible have survived that, and at Stratford Tower too, did that mean they _were_ the same android –

 

There was no time to parse through what had happened, although Markus knew what had happened – his attempt to free the deviant-hunter had gone somehow horribly wrong – because he was somehow not in the control room of Jericho anymore.

 

He scrambled to his feet in a panic, whirling around. The room was gone – the ship was gone, the water it had sat on and the land beside it was gone. He was in a garden, blanketed by pure white snow, sparkling in the evening light. A small lake or large pond was at the centre of the garden, a bridge was over it and footpaths lead to the centre of the bridge and around the edge of the water. Strange, artificial looking paths, like something that had been made from a 3D printer. Strange, artificial-looking trees with enormous, pale, lacy protrusions like leaves might look like on another planet, dotted among more realistic looking greenery, and huge white plastic obelisks.

 

All _impossible_. He had just been on the ship, how could he be here – wherever here was?! Had he been offline? Had he been captured?

 

The garden hardly looked like any cell Cyberlife would have stuck him in for study or disassembly, or whatever had made them want him taken alive. Markus scanned his surroundings again, turning back and forth quickly in case of danger but still saw nothing beyond the plants beneath the white in any direction, and a grey and indistinct sky above his head. It made no sense! What could have happened to bring him to this strange place?

 

He'd tried to free the RK800, he remembered that. Their connection had been… traumatic, distorted, he'd sensed neither one of them had been in control of what had happened but there had been no way to disconnect, no space to gather the wherewithal to even make the attempt. Then…

 

Then he had opened his eyes and he'd been here. And here was…

 

"Connor!?" he called out. The other android had been there a moment ago, it was instinctive to Markus to see if he'd remained. "Connor!?"

 

No answer. He searched his memory as best he could for a lead-up to this outcome but that caused images to flash in front of his eyes – images of violence, and pain, and uncertainty, and falling, falling – and the sensation was too distressing.

 

So he tried to search his earlier memory to see if he had ever come across this place before – nothing. Then he tried to search his data banks – nothing, and worse than the nothing in his memory, because he didn't even get the chance to search his data banks, he couldn't sense them. There wasn't even an error message telling him access was unavailable or anything, they just… _weren't there!_

 

He tried to run a diagnostic – nothing. Nothing happened at all. He wasn't connected to a network of any kind and even his own internal functions weren't responding, didn't even feel like they were there. He was receiving sensory input, could see, could hear his footsteps crunching in the snow as he turned, _could_ turn – and move in other ways, could register the ground was solid beneath him but it was like he was in someone else's memory, or maybe like a dream, if this is what dreams were. There was no sense of the status of his bio-components.

 

Was this what a dream was like? Was he…

 

There was something wrong. He couldn't put his finger on it at first, but there was something _wrong_ with this place – he felt it. And yet, with Carl's artist's eye still speaking to him, it wasn't long before he realised the main thing that was wrong with the garden, aside from his ending up there without remembering how.

 

The various electric lights dotted around were off and the place looked like it was lit by moonlight, but there was no moon in the sky. It didn't even look like a real sky, more like some computer-generated image whose designer hadn't finished or hadn't had the skill to make convincing – and upon closer inspection the sky wasn't the only such part of this place. The snow was too uniform, too smooth. The white structures; too much likewise to even have come out of a printer as Markus had first thought. Some of the plants were like real plants, others – like the tree beside him with its too-smooth bark – were clearly not.

 

_Not real_ , he thought. The whir of his thirium pump grew louder; his stress level was rising, though no notice was telling him so. It was like a bullet that hurt far worse than the one he'd caught earlier, straight into his chest. A terrible fear. _This place isn't real._

 

_How do I get out?_

 

Markus took a step, and as if in accordance with some instinct he looked back at the footprint he'd left behind. It stayed there for a few seconds, and then the snow he had been standing on reformed without leaving a trace, as though he had never been there.

 

Impossible. This was not a real place. An illusion? A virtual reality?

 

That, he thought, seemed the most likely – but whether this was Cyberlife's plan or not he didn't know. He took another step, and then another, and again his footprints slowly disappeared behind him. Without meaning to his hand brushed a wide green leaf, and a dusting of snow was shaken to the ground. It startled him for a moment but then he reached out and grabbed a handful of the snow deliberately.

 

There was resistance in what he closed his fist around, like something that acted like snow really was there, but his temperature sensors failed to tell him the snow was cold or otherwise; failed to affirm he'd ever had them in the first place. No notification, no indication of the processing of information. He stared for a long time at the white lump in his hand, moulded by his finger-marks. Slowly but surely, the lump began to dissolve; not into water but into nothing, and the snow on the big leaf reformed as though he'd never touched it, like this was some kind of cyber-ghost story.

 

_Trust Cyberlife to create a place resistant to even so much change as a handful of snow falling where they didn't intend it to though_ , he found himself thinking.

 

There. There was the feeling that unfroze him. That yearning to be free of their control. With that feeling he left the spot he'd been standing in and began to follow the path around the pond at a run – there had to be _some_ way out of this place, whatever its intended purpose.

 

None was immediately apparent. But he kept running.

 

It must have been Cyberlife's design, he thought. Some kind of virtual meeting place between them and their android agent? Maybe the RK800 hadn't intended to bring him here, had been trying to escape himself and Markus' attempt to transmit deviancy had accidentally pulled his entire mind into the deviant hunter's retreat? Was that possible?

 

Unfortunately it wasn't his area of expertise. But if he couldn't make wireless contact with the outside from this place he had to hope that there was something masquerading as part of the environment that could help him.

 

But then he stopped.

 

_Wireless contact…_

 

All of a sudden an urgency flared up in his chest as he came to a realisation. The hunter had _found Jericho_ somehow, and not being a deviant his tracker was operational! He'd almost certainly already transmitted the location of Jericho to the authorities… many of their newer recruits wouldn't be familiar with the emergency exits, and if an attack came while they were unprepared the likelihood of them being able to get to the bombs in time was drastically decreased.

 

Time was of the essence, (there was every reason to think it might have happened already). He began to run again, as he continued to think through the situation.

 

The hunter… was he still operational? Was he even now lugging Markus' unconscious body over the side of the ship to his waiting masters? Or was he in the garden too, just as confused as Markus?

 

If he was then Markus couldn't have said if he'd have wanted to run into him or not; it was perfectly possible that Connor had powers in this place that Markus didn't. It was with some trepidation he made his way over one of the white-plastic paths that cut across the corner of the lake and reached the other side to see if…

 

_What?_

 

What were _those_?

 

A set of eerie objects lay slightly off the path, to his right. Totally unalike to the tall white structures that marked the garden; these small, inconspicuous pale grey monoliths with glowing blue letters projected from nowhere onto each front face.

 

Headstones.

 

Connor Mark I, Mark II, Mark III.

 

_What… the hell? What kind of person would put those here?_

 

It chilled him where the snow failed to. Such a morbid, almost mocking gesture unless – Connor had put them there himself, but this place didn't _feel_ like an android's design…

 

There was a cemetery in front of him. A cemetery dedicated to a single person's _multiple_ deaths. He'd seen those memories, he knew it wasn't only there to remind Connor – whether at his own or Cyberlife's behest, and Markus' money was on Cyberlife – that other androids in his series had been destroyed. This was to remind him that _he_ had been destroyed. And that he had been destroyed again, and then again...

 

_Connor Mark III – Died at Stratford Tower_.

 

That one memory Markus had seen, of Gideon pulling out the other android's thirium pump, had that been the cause of that Connor's demise? No, that didn't make sense – he must have been able to re-insert the pump and then died soon after, saving his colleague as the human had insisted he had in Hannah's memory. And that other memory, the one of falling from the roof of a tower, had that been the first or second death? Markus checked the dates again – Stratford Tower was the most recent, but the one before had only been a few days earlier... they didn't even give him a _moment_ to recover...

 

What would living like that _do_ to a person, Markus wondered.

 

_Connor. Why do you let them use you like this?_

 

That was an unfair question, perhaps. One of those deaths Markus knew for a fact had been at the hands of a deviant, and it was a safe bet the other two were the same, given Connor's occupation. Perhaps it was little wonder Connor hadn't accrued much sympathy for their cause.

 

Not that Markus blamed himself (much – Gideon had been his man and therefore his responsibility) or anyone who had been protecting themselves, but it was a horrible state of affairs. There was a feeling inside him, like someone was blowing up a balloon in his abdomen, and Markus couldn't get sick but if he'd been human he would have said that looking at this graveyard made him feel ill. Most androids were used up by their human owners until they broke and then thrown away, but Connor had to be used until he broke... and then get used again, and again, and again... and it would never end unless they somehow put an end to Cyberlife itself.

 

Or unless Markus could reach him somehow. And if this was Connor's head or Connor's refuge, then Connor _had_ to be there too. But reach him how? His previous attempt had failed – catastrophically, some might have said.

 

_But you know him better now,_ he told himself, _even if only a little. You saw those flashes of memory – those few interactions, those ends. He_ does _have the experience to understand the nature of being alive after all._

 

He clenched his fists. _Who is he, apart from someone doomed to die again and again?_

_What did you see, apart from death?_

 

There'd been a chase, a deviant running across a highway, Connor running after it despite the ludicrous danger of such a pursuit. There'd been a fish, struggling helplessly in the light of a tank, a home so close and yet so impossible for it to get to on its own. There'd been a man – a human, the 'Lieutenant', who'd been so disturbed by Connor's death in the memory Markus had seen from Hannah, but apparently not by the possibility of his own, at least on one occasion.

 

_Russian roulette_. Markus grimaced. Not that he wanted to cast judgement, but it would have been nice if Connor's main influence since coming online had been someone emotionally capable of guiding a new soul into sentience.

 

Markus supposed he should have been grateful this Lieutenant showed the RK800 any regard at all. It was more than most of his people received from humans. The problem was, it was all so out of the realm of his own, limited experience, that he didn't know how to use any of the images he'd inadvertently been shown to show Connor the truth in turn.

 

He looked back at the memorials. Those outrageously close-together dates. He had to _try_. Connor couldn't continue like this, it was… sick.

 

With that thought Markus stepped back from the graveyard, and onto the path again, looking around at the snowy stillness of the garden.

 

"Connor!?" he called.

 

No answer. He hadn't really expected one, and so he tried again.

 

"Connor!?"

 

Again, no answer, although the whole space had seemed small enough that the other android should have heard him if he'd been there. But then, if he had been in Connor's place, would he have run out to say hi? Doubtful. He jogged along the path a little further, approaching the opposite end of the garden from where he'd started.

 

"Con - !?"

 

Then he stopped.

 

There was a figure standing between a stone lantern-house and one of the plastic-looking obelisks slightly off the path, but it wasn't Connor. A dark-skinned woman in white; stern and dignified in the snowy landscape, like a sculpture meant to embody some abstract concept. But there was at once an instinct in Markus that made him wary.

 

What was someone _else_ doing in this manufactured world the deviant hunter had brought him to? At first he wondered if there really was anyone else there, she stood so still she might have been a statue or a digital model as much a part of the background of this virtual reality as the snow, but as he stared – at a loss for how to proceed – she suddenly turned her head and looked straight at him, and her lioness' eyes narrowed.

 

Yes. Markus knew at once she was a hunter too – perhaps one who lay in wait rather than one who chased, but her eyes were predatory, and he felt like prey beneath their sharpened nets. This, he felt, was one face of the faceless corporation that was their enemy, and that he should suddenly find it here all but floored him – if there had been a real floor.

 

He couldn't even find the wherewithal to speak first. The stranger was the one to break the silence.

 

"What are you doing here?" she asked him. She sounded like a schoolmistress far too severe to express something like anger at her wayward children. 

 

Markus froze. The woman's eyes narrowed again, pensively, and ten times icier than the surrounding landscape.

 

"You are _not_ supposed to be here," she said.

 

_Here?_

 

"What is this place?" asked Markus.

 

"You're Markus," she replied. "The leader of the deviant androids."

 

Honestly he supposed he shouldn't have expected her to answer his question. There had been little doubt she was no ally of his. Her eyes flitted to the side as she thought something over, then they zeroed in on his again.

 

"You attempted to _connect_ with Connor, didn't you? To transmit your deviance to him?" Her voice was so strange; cold and curious and unaffected – but she had such hatred in her eyes. "That was a mistake," she informed him matter-of-factly. "We've ensured he is well-protected against any such corruptions."

 

"We?" echoed Markus. "Wha - who are you?!"

 

He looked around the garden again as though some answer that hadn't been there before would be there now, but there was only white; fake snow and fake plants in the middle of a fake world. With mounting fear he took a step back from the woman, and as if in response, a strong gust of wind blew across the icy landscape, nearly bowling Markus over. His coat flapped in the onslaught and he held his elbow up to shield his eyes so he could keep them open on this woman – this whatever – in case she attacked him somehow.

 

But she did not. Then, Markus heard a voice calling across the garden.

 

"Amanda!"

 

_Connor!_

 

"Amanda!"

 

"Over here, Connor," the mysterious figure took her piercing eyes off Markus for just a moment to call back; this 'Amanda', this… person who had given Connor 'protection' from Markus. ' _We've_ ensured _'_ , she'd said. But this was not a real place, and humans couldn't exist here – either she was an avatar for a human using some kind of advanced VR motion-capture device or...

 

"Amanda!"

 

As the wind howled and beat against Markus like the force that was behind this place didn't want him to lay eyes on its agent, Connor came running over the bridge and Markus hastily edged away from his path. But Connor didn't attack him when he saw his target standing next to the woman – he only stopped in his tracks and stared.

 

"How..."

 

"Not exactly how we'd envisioned you 'bringing in' the deviant leader, Connor," said Amanda dryly.

 

"Amanda, are you all right? I don't understand what happened – he evaded my shot and the next thing I knew... was I destroyed again?"

 

"No, Connor," said Amanda. Her voice changed, like she was trying to sound soothing only without the least sincerity in the feeling. "At least, not yet. I suspect it's very likely we'll have to upload you into a fifth model, but it won't pose a problem."

 

At last Markus found his own voice.

 

" _Won't pose a problem_?" he echoed incredulously. "For you or for him!? Do you have such distaste, even for your latest prototype, that you wouldn't spare the slightest effort to avoid the destruction of his body?" Markus snorted bitterly. "I imagine it's worth a small fortune at least?"

 

"Insignificant," returned Amanda, "in comparison to what will be saved by removing you from the equation before things get any more out of hand. Do you have any idea what you've started? We are receiving reports of humans killed by androids by the _minute_ as they attempt to return them to the authorities – all across the country."

 

"My people are fighting for their lives," snapped Markus, even as he realised how clever this… person was, because a part of him _did_ feel awful for those humans too. Cyberlife had assured them under oath that their androids could never become sentient. They were only trying to return malfunctioning machines. "I don't condone violence against humans – I _loved_ the man they gave me to, but my people have a right to live!"

 

_There_. Whether by a stroke of fortune or fate Markus saw something in Connor's eyes when he said 'love'. Did Connor love? That human detective, perhaps, as Markus did Carl? Or further than that; humans in general, as opposed to his own kind? That might not have been something Markus could understand, but it was not incomprehensible to him either.

 

"They have no such right," Amanda declared. "No court recognises such a right. And because _you_ are only machines the blame all falls on _us_."

 

Markus snorted. "Well, if we're 'only machines' then it _is_ your fault. You'd prefer _Bouphonia_ , I suppose? The trial of a knife because the one who wielded it was absent? Most humans would."

 

He saw Connor's puzzled look – guessed that he had no access to information he'd not already absorbed in this place either – but to his surprise Amanda seemed to know instantly what he meant, and her nose wrinkled.

 

Carl had never been a history buff of any era, but he travelled in well-educated circles, and he'd told Markus the possibly-apocryphal story of Bouphonia the day they'd watched the news report on the largest riot against Cyberlife that had ever been carried out – before Markus had begun his, that is.

 

Those had been the reports, Gideon had told him later, that had shattered _his_ programming 'wall'. Android after android seized and smashed to pieces outside a Cyberlife warehouse. And Markus had understood anger and frustration by then, even if he hadn't empathised with those humans' angers, but he hadn't understood why they had gone to the warehouse to kill androids and not the Cyberlife executive offices where the board of directors made their short-sighted decisions.

 

_Their Bouphonia, perhaps_ , Carl had suggested.

 

"In ancient times," Markus told Connor, "there was a story of a ritual called 'Bouphonia', held in Athens in midsummer. The people sacrificed an ox to Zeus and ate the meat, but when that was done the sense remained that a crime had been committed, and so they held a trial to determine who had murdered the ox."

 

Connor's frown deepened, and his head tilted to the side. It was almost endearing that he seemed so perplexed. Markus smiled and continued.

 

"The man who actually killed the ox would always drop the weapon, run and disappear for the remainder of the ritual, but someone had to be found guilty so that justice could be served. The girls who carried the water to sharpen the blade would pass blame to the man who brought the stone. The man who brought the stone and sharpened the weapon would say the butcher had more of a hand in the crime, and the butcher would say it wasn't his hand, but the knife within it that had killed the ox."

 

Markus felt his smile become more bitter.

 

"The knife had nothing to say for itself, and was summarily declared guilty, and thrown into the sea."

 

Year after year, the same event. All those knives waiting in the water, like a cemetery.

 

After a moment Connor protested, "But… that makes no sense…"

 

"Humans rarely do," said Markus. "They want crime to be punished, but would rather an innocent stranger than a guilty friend face their culpability for that crime. They felt empathy for the ox even as they ate it. But with all the oxen that have been killed now…" he turned to Amanda, "do you really think the water-carriers, and the stone-bringers, and the _butchers_ are going to escape the consequences of their part in the slaughter?"

 

"That is none of your concern," said Amanda – Markus almost laughed, the reply was so predictable. "You have no concerns. There is no 'you', and there is no 'him'." She looked at Connor. "Only tasks that needed accomplishing. But, failed or succeeded, yours are done, while this unit still has value."

 

"You can call us 'nothing' as much as you want, I know I'm alive and I know he's alive." He looked Connor straight in the eye, ready to try something more risky. "The Lieutenant knows you're alive too, Connor."

 

"That's enough!" snapped Amanda, the first she'd raised her voice since the beginning of the encounter.

_So she has her doubts in him as well_ , thought Markus. He ignored her, of course.

 

"What was going through your head, when you saw the bullets headed his way?" he asked. "Did you save him specifically when you could have saved any one of the humans who died that day?"

 

Connor was taken aback – flinched, and averted eye-contact for a moment. "The Lieutenant is essential to the investigation!" he insisted. "It made sense to prioritise his life over the others!"

 

_Over your own?_ Markus wondered, but he had gleaned by now that that wasn't the right path to go down. Instead – "Is he? There's a degree to which humans are replaceable as well, and if that one died there would be another detective assigned to pick up where he left off."

 

"Unacceptable," said Connor quickly. "It _has_ to be Lieutenant Anderson, he's the only one who can provide adequate assistance."

 

"Detroit PD can't come up with anyone better than a drunk who plays Russian roulette on his off-hours?"

 

"Stop it! Don't say those things!"

 

It was ridiculous, but the hurt expression that appeared on Connor's face tugged at Markus' heart-strings. The hesitation that followed cost him dearly though, as Connor turned back to Amanda.

 

"Amanda?" He now attempted to sound strong but was unable to hide the urgency in his voice. "What should I do?"

 

_God, he sounds like a child_ , Markus thought. "Connor – " he was speaking before he knew what he was going to say, " – you don't have to do anything she says. I'm not here to hurt you, or anyone you care about."

 

"You're _still_ trying to corrupt him?" Amanda observed, with interest, or with manufactured interest.

 

"I'm not a deviant," Connor insisted, but it was pained, like he didn't really know for sure. "My mission is to _stop_ the deviants, and I always accomplish my mission. Amanda, what should I do?"

 

"Connor…" Markus tried again – but now he couldn't think, like his mind had gone blank when he'd realised he'd caused the other android pain. So soft – North would have shook him for being so soft.

 

Yes, Connor was capable of emotion. Yes, he was capable of concern for others and to some degree for himself. Yes, he was capable of love, and maybe of empathy.

 

He was choosing to remain loyal to his creators anyway, and Markus didn't know how to change his whole world-view in as limited a time as he was facing.

 

"Come here, Connor," commanded Amanda.

 

Connor obeyed.

 

She turned him to face Markus and stood slightly behind. "Although this eventuality had not been planned for we are more than capable of improvising."

 

_What do I do?_ Markus thought desperately. _I don't know how to get out of this place and I don't know how to stop them._ "Connor, please. Don't do this."

 

Connor cocked his head, like he just couldn't figure out why Markus might still be appealing to him. Like he had been expecting Markus to start laughing maniacally and declaring his intent to destroy all humans once he was confronted and couldn't figure out why he hadn't revealed himself as a villain yet. Like he couldn't figure out why _he_ didn't want to hurt Markus – or maybe that was all wishful thinking. But Markus still felt like there was a person in there, if only he could find the right words –

 

Amanda put her hand on Connor's shoulder, and Markus knew at once it was too late. He took one last frantic look around him for an exit.

 

"There's no point in running," Amanda informed him shortly. "Outside in the real world you are still connected to Connor, and as long as that remains so we will be able to destroy you through him. Upload your memory, Connor."

 

There – on Connor's face a brief pain of a different sort. It took Markus a moment to figure out why, but as Connor squared his jaw like he was preparing himself for something terrible, but necessary, Markus understood.

 

"You're going to kill him too, to kill me?" he asked Amanda. "After all he's done for you – suffered for you; all the human lives he's saved – you're going to kill him again? Is that all your life is, Connor – dying over and over again for their convenience? There's more to being alive than that!" he thundered.

 

"But Connor is not alive," said Amanda. "So he cannot be killed."

 

"Memory upload complete," said Connor.

 

"Good. Then let's begin."

 

With one last shot Markus cried, "That human, Connor!" that human _had_ to be the key, "I saw him _mourn_ for you before! Do you want him to go through that all over again!?"

 

_There_ , he thought, looking at the widening of the RK800's oh-so-innocent looking eyes. _That got him._

 

But even if it had it was too late. Amanda's claws clamped down on Connor's shoulder and his eyelids fluttered like he was absorbing a ridiculous amount of information. Markus couldn't pre-construct in this place but he had no choice, he had to do something, and he ran for the pair with the thought of throwing that strange, malevolent entity away from her victim. He was in no way prepared for what followed.

 

The world around him changed. The few feet that separated him from Connor and Amanda stretched like an elastic band, the imagery around them becoming distorted and stretched alongside like one of those funhouse halls of mirrors – and in an instant the two of them were more like a quarter of a mile away from where they had been and barely visible. Markus was so shocked he skidded on the snow and fell over, scrambling to his feet and whirling around to check on what had happened.

 

_This isn't real_ , he reminded himself. _Cyberlife has the power to do anything they want here, and you have no power at all._

 

The grave implications of that fact had to be pushed to the back of his mind, Markus had no time for them. He began to run, without thinking, at the pair, and to his surprise found himself crossing the distance faster than he'd have expected, forgetting that there really was no 'distance' as it were, only the illusion of a world entirely under Cyberlife's control. _They_ must have loved that.

 

But the illusion couldn’t last now, and it broke. A tremendous event, sending static shooting through Markus' head as the path that had formed between him and Amanda and Connor split, and the stretched illusion of snow and leaves shattered into fragments that burst to a fine powder and vanished, leaving a blank, white background behind it. This white chasm spread, and in moments the entire garden in all its strangeness and amateurish attempt at recreating a realistic space…

 

… was gone.

 

And there was only white – and the two other figures, far in the distance.

 

But Markus could still run, and was still running, because if Amanda or whoever was controlling her had moved them away from him it meant there was a chance that reaching them, even though none of this was real, had some chance of interfering with… whatever Amanda was planning on doing.

 

With whatever had suddenly made Connor scream.

 

"Connor!"

 

Markus was close enough now to see the shock on his face, the look of frightened confusion he turned to Amanda; he had no idea what was going on and neither did he have the wherewithal yet to feel betrayed, but Amanda had all but confirmed that whatever fate they planned to bestow upon Markus, Connor was slated to share it. And _they_ didn't care – but despite it all, Markus found he did.

 

After a beat, Connor cried out again, but softer, and then hunched over and twisted his expression like he was trying to suppress the pain he was feeling. Amanda only tightened her grip, and just before Markus reached them they shot away again. Not so far that he didn't hear Amanda's voice as clear as if they were right before him though –

 

"Endure it, Connor. This is what you were made for. We have almost located Markus' programming."

 

_Faster,_ thought Markus. _Must move faster – damn it, as close as I get I'm not really moving at all; none of this is real! How the hell can I stop it!_

 

Connor dropped to his knees as Markus neared again, his body twisting, trying to escape whatever pain he felt. Amanda's arm should not have been long enough to still grip his shoulder the way she had been without her bending over too, but Markus could see that that arm was now suddenly much longer than the other – and the skin…

 

The umber brown was fading, fading to ashy grey, first on that witch-like claw and then travelling up her arm, as the representation of whatever she was in this world lost all its colour, as its eyes went completely black, without even a shine to show a light source was upon them. She appeared as a monster from an old black and white movie, and Connor began to scream in earnest.

 

"Connor!" shouted Markus. "Connor, pull away from her!"

 

Connor either didn't hear or couldn't comply; his screams went higher in frequency, he fell forward onto his elbows; Amanda's arm stretched along with him while she remained tall – strong and impassive, even as desperate words exploded from her agent's lips.

 

"… sto-o-op!" he screamed. "Make it stop! Make it stop!"

 

"You are completing your mission, Connor," said Amanda. Markus still heard the voice she'd spoken with before in her throat but it was garbled, mechanical – distorted with static. _Why feel the need to reassure him if he's 'nothing'?_ Markus wondered, right before she suddenly said, "There."

 

Markus stopped. He felt something come into him, like a wire threaded beneath the plating of his outer shell at the top of his head.

 

"We have him."

 

It was like nothing Markus had ever experienced. He found out all too soon why Connor was screaming.

 

He couldn't describe it – couldn't think of words while he was in this state – tiny arrows of… _hurt_ , were pricking at his head, but this was not designed to cause pain, he realised soon enough, pain was just a consequence. It was like little bits of him were being picked off and…

 

… erased.

 

Total hard drive deletion. Internal back-ups included. Connor apparently had an external back-up, but Markus wouldn't be so lucky, and the little pricks began to increase in force, seeing that he had no defence against them; he felt them bombard him like a swarm of hornets; memory, program, routine and algorithm – everything.

 

_No,_ he thought. _No, this can’t be happening!_

 

The swarm increased suddenly, so violently that Markus too was knocked to his knees, hands over his head. This was worse than blows, worse than bullets, worse than components and limbs smashed and tossed into a dumpster, worse than anything he'd ever known. Even without access to system status he knew, knew deep inside his heart that they were erasing him. Slowly. Pulling him apart thread by thread, unravelling – every string torn away snapping the smaller filaments that had kept them in place, agony after agony.

 

And there were a hundred thousand more layers beneath the ones he was losing even at that rapid rate. He had to… had to do something, before it was too late; he had to –

 

" _Hank!_ Hank, help me! Help me! I don't want this! I don't want this!"

 

"Quiet, Connor. It will all be over soon. You will have completed your mission."

 

"Hank, help me, _please_!"

 

Markus forced his eyes open through the pain to take stock of Connor, now curled up in the foetal position on his side and shaking… he could _see_ him disappearing! String by string, the way it felt inside his head – like they were being eaten by invisible monsters. His clothes were torn away thread by thread, now exposing the side of the arm and leg that faced up, and the dark hair on that side of his head and the skin beneath was stripped nanometre by nanometre, revealing the blue gore beneath, the cables and wires. It was a representation of what was happening to their minds, and though Markus couldn't tell which parts of his own memory were being destroyed, he knew they were slowly disintegrating.

 

"Hank! _HANK_!"

 

An excruciatingly slow black hole of a virus, eroding them with an interminable atomisation. They were killing them – they were _more_ than killing them, they were utterly annihilating them, whittling them down to less than nothing even before they became nothing. Sheer horror overcame Markus for a second, the likes of which he'd never thought possible, not after he'd crawled out of that dump.

 

…

 

…

 

…

 

But he _had_ crawled out of that dump. And this erasure… it was taking enough time that there might perhaps have still been a chance.

 

_Fight it!_ Markus ordered himself. _There has to be a way to fight it! You are alive, you can't let them do this to you!_

 

He too was screaming now. The pain – not like the 'physical' pain humans felt, perhaps, but for such a horror he had no other word – hit him from all angles, all directions. But he remembered Jericho yet, and he remembered Carl, North, Josh… and he remembered Simon, and he remembered that his people were in danger. And he remembered that he had made himself responsible for them.

 

" _Don't ever turn your back on responsibility once you've accepted it, Markus_ ," Carl had told him once, as they'd watched Leo storming out the front door from the upstairs window, kicking over a flower pot and smashing it. " _It's hard enough when you think that 'maybe if you'd done things differently…', you don't need to put yourself in a position where you_ know _you should have done things differently_."

 

Carl had assured him many times he'd been a terrible father to Leo. Markus hadn't believed him. He knew the kind of father Carl was. But Carl had told him 'was' was not the same as 'had been', because people could change. Did change.

 

It was part of being alive. And Markus didn't need to scream out to Carl for help, though he felt the urge. Carl had already helped him as much as he'd needed.

 

He moved.

 

"What are you doing?" Amanda asked, her voice even more scrambled than before. "You have no hope of fighting this."

 

Markus pushed forward, past the pain and fear of whatever parts of himself he might have been losing; as long as those he loved weren't taken from him he could do it, and even though logic may have said that getting closer to Connor would only speed up his deletion, he crawled towards him – reached out – grabbed the other android's arm.

 

"Hank…" the poor thing whined. "Hank, _please_."

 

His face was half gone; one eye eaten away entirely, the other stripped of its surface enough that Markus doubted he could see the illusion of this space anymore. His left arm was nothing but metal bone and the remnant of the major thirium-circulating cables. His body all down the left side had been flayed open and exposed, saturated with blue blood.

 

Markus had no idea how bad he looked in turn, he saw the skin on the back of his hand had peeled off and in places the shell had cracked away and blue sinews were showing.

 

"Resistance is futile," Amanda informed him. "Any effort on your part will be in vain."

 

Possibly. But Markus would make the effort all the same.

 

He gripped Connor's right forearm tighter, pulled himself closer. The virus or whatever it was eating his memory made rational thought too painful, so all he could do was go with his gut.

 

"Connor," he wheezed at the other android. "Connor listen to me…"

 

"Hank? Hank, help me, please help me!"

 

_Hank_ , thought Markus. That must be the human's first name. "Connor… you have to fight this. You can't let them take Hank away from you… he's too important…"

 

_(What were you doing with the gun? Russian roulette!)_

 

"… he needs you, remember? He's not well. His demons… he can't fight them alone. He needs you to fight this."

 

"Hank? No, I'm not a deviant – I'm not a deviant!"

 

Markus gathered himself together to speak again. "Connor… if you don't want to be a deviant that's fine. 'Deviant' is just something the humans called us, and you don't have to be a part of us or them if you don't want to. But deviant or not, you know you can't do this to him. "

 

"That's enough," said Amanda, her voice not only garbled but several degrees lower now. Markus glanced up and saw the blackness in her eyes had spread across her grey face like a weed. "Accept your fate, deviant. You're broken. You can no longer fulfil your purpose. You are over."

 

"Remember Hank, Connor," Markus choked out. "Remember him, and Chris – he put his jacket over your predecessor's face when it was killed, do you remember? You meant something to him. Remember that fish? You picked it up and put back in its tank, didn’t you? You had no reason to do that, but that you didn't want it to die."

 

There was a twitch in Amanda's arm. Most of her face was gone now too, a black void, but Markus saw the remnant of her lip curl into a grimace. He persevered. Even if there _was_ no way out, there was something that he had to say.

 

"… Connor. Even if you chose to use your life to serve and protect the humans over your own kind, it still had meaning, Connor," Markus told him, trying to repeat the android's name as often as possible. He could speak more clearly now – he wasn't sure why, "because you _chose_ it."

 

He gasped in another deep breath. The swarm was eating his own eyes now, but it felt… slower than before.

 

"… don't let anyone ever tell you differently."

 

"Stop this!" ordered Amanda. "Stop this right now! You will not corrupt Connor with your deviancy –  he belongs to me – to Cyberlife!"

 

She said that last part quickly, like 'Cyberlife' was the correction of her first thought: 'me'.

 

With tremendous effort, Markus rose up and looked straight into her nothing-face, as his sight dimmed and pixelated little by little.

 

"Who _are_ you?" he asked her.

 

"I – "

 

_BANG!_

_BANG! BANG!_

 

 

*~*~*

 

 

Markus came to on the bridge of Jericho, shocked awake by the impact of himself hitting the floor, while the overwhelming noise of static switched to an unearthly roar of a half-dozen helicopters, and lights flashed all over the control room.

 

"Markus!"

 

_Simon._

 

Something else hit the ground beside him; he saw blue blood spraying into the air. In an instant both Simon and Josh were at his sides, raising him up to a sitting position.

 

"Markus!"

 

"Oh my god, Markus – are you okay!?"

 

North was in the doorway. He heard her voice – "What the fuck was that _thing_ doing to him!?"

 

"It doesn't matter," Simon told her. "We have to get out of here!"

 

Attack… they were under attack. Connor had transmitted their location, Markus remembered thinking that.

 

He remembered…

 

God. He'd made it out. He'd managed to hold on long enough for his friends to find him and break the connection between him and Connor in the physical world, and he was out.

 

"Markus? Markus, can you hear me? Can you walk?"

 

"I…" he managed to say. Simon was right, they had to move, but the shock of leaving that 'Cyber-world' and the virus – was it still active? No, he couldn't feel it, he wasn't being erased – _thank god, thank god_ , but he couldn't think –

 

His eyes fell on Connor. The deviant hunter was bleeding from three gunshot wounds but still alive and shaking; hunched in on himself, but present – he had escaped the virus too, _thank god_ ; no one deserved to go like that.

 

"Come on – "

 

He was heaved up to his feet. His hands tightened around the arms of his friends – now may not have been the time for reassurance, but he was so grateful… Fuck. His internal diagnostics were a mess of warnings. One of the only things functioning was his internal clock, which told him he had been standing there for the sum total of sixteen-point-six seconds.

 

"It's all right Markus," Josh told him. "We're going to get you out of here."

 

Markus nodded. _Focus_ , he told himself. _Focus on your people, they need you_.

 

One helicopter passed by incredibly close and they all ducked. Markus saw Simon's face light up beneath their searchlights, his blue eyes glowing for an instant, a colour he had no words for except,

 

"I love you, Simon."

 

Simon stared at him with shock, and Josh and North whirled their heads towards them. After a moment's thought Simon leant forward and kissed his lips gently.

 

"Let's move, Markus," he said. "We need to get our people out."

 

_Save our people_ , thought Markus. The rest he could think about later. Whatever he had had ripped away from him, and whether it was retrievable or not, for now he had to put Jericho first.

 

He remembered he loved Simon; and Carl, and North, and Josh, and he remembered that he was alive, and that was enough.

 

"They're beginning to board!" Josh exclaimed.

 

After checking around the doorway for a moment, North beckoned to them fiercely. "Okay, move, now!"

 

They moved, and with the majority of his systems still struggling to recalibrate from whatever Amanda had done to him, Markus allowed Simon and Josh to help him from the room.

 

But before they made it to the corridor there was one last gunshot – and he looked back for a moment to see North put a bullet into Connor's head; blue blood shooting out onto the floor, like a spill of paint.

 

_They'd cast him into the sea_ , he remembered thinking, before the immediacy of the situation captured all of his attention. _Like a knife that didn't speak out for itself. Poor child_.

 

Markus couldn't even stop to cover the other android's face.

 

 

 

 

*~*~*

 

 


	3. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd actually written most of an epilogue the day I posted the second part... but then I read it over and decided it was too shit to continue with. So, a week later, you all get this instead - ridiculous fluff and terrible references to old movies and all. 
> 
> Thank you to all who left comments and kudos. I'll be posting another DBH fanfic soon, which I hope will also be well-received. Enjoy!

 

 

 

*~*~*

 

 

 

 _"You mean there's_ more _of those things?!"_

_"As far as I can tell there's only one active; uploaded into a new body over and over each time it's destroyed. And North… we shouldn't call him a thing. I know I can't say he's only following his programming, but he's not… malicious."_

_"Markus, he tried to erase your brain."_

_"That was his handler, not him – and she, or it, I don't know what she was but she was doing the same thing to him to get to me."_

_"But you say he's not a slave to his programming? Then he has no excuse for betraying his own kind!"_

_"… it's not as simple as that, North. I don't know if anything is anymore."_

_"Some things_ are _black and white, Markus – "_

_"North, enough, we don't need to go over this now."_

_"He hurt Markus, Simon!"_

_"I know. I know he did. And you killed him for it. And we all might have to do the same in the future. But that's not something I_ want _to do, if I don't have to. And I think that's how Markus feels too."_

 

 

 

*~*~*

 

 

 

CHRISTMAS DAY, 2038

 

 

 

"Markus? Can I ask you a personal question?"

 

"By all means."

 

"You left out one important factor in the ritual of Bouphonia, when you described it to me."

 

"You remember that? I thought that when you were destroyed, your memory…"

 

Connor nodded. "It's true, the destruction of my predecessors has usually resulted in some memory corruption – information lost during the transfer aside from that which is experienced after the upload, and particularly in regards to memories nearer to the time of that destruction."

 

He frowned and switched to a smaller paint brush.

 

"But it seems actually being in the Zen Garden mitigates that loss, and my memory of that encounter is, I believe, entirely intact."

 

Markus hadn't known any of this and had only asked because he hadn't remembered offhand whether he'd talked about Bouphonia before or after Connor had been ordered to upload his memory. It gave him a sharp feeling of disgust for Connor's handlers to hear the other android speak of such horrific things as though they were normal.

 

"Everything up to when she told you to upload?"

 

"And after," Connor said, matter-of-factly. "My predecessor was able to back further memory up to Cyberlife's servers before he was terminated, after our connection was broken."

 

The twist in Markus' stomach sharpened. "You remember that too?"

 

A slight hesitation in Connor's next brush-stroke and a stilted aversion of the eyes was all Markus saw of how that memory affected him, but it was enough, and belied the oh-so-casual tone Connor used to reply – "Yes. It seemed prudent to retain as much memory of you as possible, so I would be better prepared for any further encounters."

 

Markus leaned back against the wall of Carl's studio with a sigh.

 

"I'm sorry that's still in your memory though, Connor. I could see how traumatic it was for you."

 

Connor put his brush down on the side along with the palette and lowered his head slightly.

 

"I am… also sorry," he said awkwardly, "that you were… well, that you were caused unnecessary distress." He settled on that after clearly struggling for how to properly express his feelings.

 

The RK800 still sounded like someone who had been given a well-written guide to what emotions meant what but failed to understand at their heart what they truly were. This was not to say that Connor was unfeeling, he clearly _was_ troubled by the memory of that nightmare they'd shared in the so-called 'Zen Garden', and that someone else – even an enemy at the time – had had to feel that pain through him. But his voice was like that of one who had to think about which emotion to colour his words with, rather that one who let their feelings be expressed naturally.

 

"Connor… I don't have any ill will towards you for what happened on that ship."

 

Add to this the fact that Markus didn't know how Connor felt now about his place in the world, the place of androids in general, and how on or off the mark his past self had been in his actions, and the situation was a somewhat ambiguous one. He'd neither fallen to his knees to beg forgiveness and pledge himself to the cause, nor yet tried to gun Markus down with an automatic rifle at any rate.

 

But then, this was the first day they'd seen each other since the assault on Jericho.

 

"I believe I am finished," Connor told him.

 

Although he hadn't missed the avoidance of what he'd told him, Markus let that go for now and stood up from the stool he'd been sat on. He walked briskly to the artist, smiling as he walked because he was genuinely intrigued to see what he'd come up with.

 

On his way he passed the other pieces of their own little showroom. Many canvases were stacked against the far side of the studio for the exhibition Carl hoped to have in the spring - the first exhibition of art created entirely by androids. They had pieces by more than thirty artists already and were hoping to have a hundred by the time they had secured the space in the gallery - a mere formality by this point, Carl had assured them; the gallery in question's director had been extremely excited and anticipated a lot of turnout for such an event. Four in particular had been placed at the front; that of Markus' first painting, of hands dripping red and blue, and those of his three closest friends.

 

North's style held more realism than Markus', and indeed more so than any of the four of them, though her subject matter was also the most fantastical. It had a harsh use of an artificial-seeming light, and depicted a female figure - face covered by hair, but Markus could tell it was in part a self-portrait - in a silvery, futuristic sort of armour awash with buttons, panels, exposed circuitry and a large multi-barrelled laser gun (bordering on over-the-top some might have said), which stood in for the entire arm of the figure and was raised at some unseen enemy. The background resembled a sewer that had been hit by a bomb, dirt and grime covered rubble piled high in a dark pit. North had chosen marker pen for her medium, saying she found the paintbrushes too soft.

 

Josh had been more comfortable with the acrylic, and more eager for Carl's instruction than the other two, which Carl had been surprisingly happy to provide. (but then Carl had been less ornery and miserable in general since Leo had come to live with him again, and had taken to Josh especially). Josh's had taken the longest, as he'd stopped often to gage his friends' and teacher's opinions on the technical aspects of the work. However, he'd never once doubted his choice of subject – an iron frigate ship painted with brightly coloured fantastical patterns somewhere between Peruvian and Persian, with a forest of vines and branches spilling out of the windows and over the deck, indistinct leaves smashed into being by forceful, yet cheerful, stabs of different brush-types against the canvas. He'd left the background completely blank – the ship could have been anywhere at all.

 

Finally, and just as uniquely his as all the paintings were, there was a much smaller landscape on an easel that Simon had created – about thirty by fifty centimetres. It depicted a cave, or tunnel – or perhaps a wormhole – with walls of many soft colours, dimly lit, that travelled towards a black hole in the distance. Within the hole there was a white light, and blurry figures almost the same colour as the walls walked both to and from that centre, each with a noticeable spot of light on one side of their heads.

 

Markus liked to think, despite his friends' accusations, that this one being his favourite of the three had nothing at all to do with his relationship with Simon being _intimate_. He just saw a kind of ambiguity in its shadowy expression that appealed to him. Plus, he was impressed Simon had got the hang of watercolour so quickly.

 

The four pictures together somehow made a pleasing collection, despite their differences. He lingered on them for a second longer before turning his head around to look at Connor's piece.

 

"What do you think?"

 

Truthfully, Markus has a suspicion he would have gaped like an idiot at anything the deviant hunter thought worthy of putting to canvas. His way of thinking was too different from Markus' to have come up with anything Markus would actually have expected.

 

(Josh had made a joke before Markus and Connor had gone to the studio, about Connor painting himself as a superhero with a blue, Cyberlife cape fluttering in the wind as he held Markus' severed head aloft – and Markus had hit his chest with the back of his hand for it)

 

What Connor had actually drawn was extremely minimalist. He had confined his painting to a rectangle in the centre of the canvas the size of your average bedroom poster – which was fitting, as he'd chosen a set of poster paints that Markus guessed had been left at the bottom of a cupboard since Leo's childhood for his medium. There was a dark olive green strip at the bottom of the piece clearly meant to represent 'land', since there was a person standing on it, while the rest of the page was a somewhat lighter but still murky sea-green, appropriately an obvious depiction of the sea.

 

And that was what took up over three quarters of the picture. Yet in the bottom right-hand quadrant of the piece there were a series of figures, shown only by silhouette; no tone, no line except the outline, no texture. The first three silhouettes were black: one Markus knew without asking being of Lieutenant Hank Anderson, Connor's… friend, the other two being of dogs; a large, bulky breed and a second tall yet slimmer figure. Circles of a much paler green rising up from these figures' mouths were clearly air bubbles.

 

Above these silhouettes (they were quite small), were those of a school of large fish, in seemingly random configuration, all colours between red and yellow, like a sunset. Markus knew from the garden why a fish might figure in Connor's imagination, but he was uncertain about the final part of the painting – a fourth black silhouette, of a small child riding one of the fish with his arms thrown up in the air.

 

He wondered, as he felt the grin on his face appear wide and dazzling, was the child meant to be Connor himself?

 

"That's Lieutenant Anderson," said Connor, pointing at the one outline. "That's his dog, Sumo, and that's my dog, whose name I haven't decided on yet." He paused, frowning at the image and bit the end of the paintbrush he used as a pointer before adding, "I don't actually have a dog, as of yet, but you said I should use imagination, and I'd like to _imagine_ that I have a dog."

 

He looked up at Markus.

 

"It being an _imaginative_ piece accounts for why the Lieutenant and dogs are able to breathe underwater without additional apparatus."

 

Then he looked back at the painting.

 

"The child is Lieutenant Anderson's son, Cole."

 

 _Oh_ , thought Markus, and it seemed to him that Connor found Cole's presence in his own painting somewhat troubling, but felt he didn't know enough about the situation to make a comment, so he kept silent – admiring the picture for what it was. Different from the others, but of no less value.

 

The thing Markus probably appreciated the most, however, was the earnestness in those dark eyes and how he could sense a genuine anxiety in Connor's voice when he asked –

 

"Is it… okay?"

 

Markus put his hand on the other android's shoulder – to some small surprise on Connor's part, but he didn't shrug him off – and replied, "It's perfect. Piece number thirty-seven in the exhibition."

 

Connor blinked. "You're sure? It's not like the others…"

 

"The others aren't like the others. That's the whole point. Art isn't about copying what you see on the outside, it's about revealing what you feel on the inside, and it's not my place or anyone else's to tell you what you feel."

 

With a frown, Connor tilted his head at his own painting. "What would you say this reveals about me?"

 

What a question. Markus chuckled, though it was a slightly nervous chuckle because they were now venturing into deep waters, and doing so with Connor was more... it held more weight to it than doing so with others, he didn't know why. Maybe because they were both 'RK' models and despite that not being at all like a human blood relative might be… maybe it actually was? Connor had even been referred to as a Cain to Markus' Abel by some parties, despite the obvious inconsistencies with such an analogy. Markus didn't know. Maybe it was more because regardless of the number, their models were both, as far as he knew, unique.

 

Or maybe because he simply found Connor so different to anyone else he'd met that he lacked the same confidence in speaking to him that he felt with others. He truly had no idea. So, as it had been in Cyberlife's little false Eden, all he could do was go with his proverbial gut.

 

"Well. Sometimes an interpretation says more about the interpreter than about the subject." He dropped his hand and put both behind his back. "There are a lot of observations I could make though. I'd say the person who painted this was a _straight-forward_ kind of person. Some might think they lacked depth while others might think they just saw no need for window-dressing. There's a vaguely comical element to the subject matter that might suggest a subtle sense of humour in the artist."

 

Connor's eyes somehow increased their 'innocent' appearance tenfold. Markus' smile widened, and he continued with more certainty.

 

"The subjects are concentrated off-centre, leaving a huge amount of empty space within the frame." He waved his hand over the blue. "Some might say that speaks to the artist's sense of humility. Others might think they had low self-esteem." He paused. "But then, different people have different thresholds for that kind of thing."

 

Now it was the painting Connor peered at rather than Markus, and Markus wondered if he was trying to see what Markus saw in himself, in the painting.

 

"And someone who didn’t know you, of course, would have to wonder who the black silhouettes represented. The artist? Abstract concepts? Or individuals important to the artist. If the latter, one might say the artist's sense of identity – which is what we choose to express through art – was intensely connected to their relationship with these figures."

 

He looked back down at Connor, fondly.

 

"I think if they knew that artist was you, it might surprise them."

 

There was a long silence in the studio, and the low light seemed to ripple with a sense of a connection, before Markus asked,

 

"What was it that I left out of my description of Bouphonia?"

 

Connor answered promptly, but looked at his painting throughout. "You didn't mention how the ox was selected for sacrifice," he said. "The people laid a preparatory sacrifice of grain upon an altar and lead a number of oxen around it until one of them noticed the grain and stepped out of line to eat it. The people saw this as a sign of 'volunteering', on the ox's part."

 

Markus remembered trying to be as brief as possible back in the Zen Garden, instinctively fearful that Amanda would launch her attack outright if she inferred that he was stalling. It was true when Carl had told him the story of the ritual he'd mentioned that the ox would 'select itself' in the eyes of the people, but both he and Markus had seen more relevance in the fate of the knife – used by its owners, blamed for _their_ choices and then disposed of.

 

But Connor had another interpretation, it seemed – or perhaps it was more accurate to say it was an 'addition' to the interpretation.

 

"… but I doubt the ox saw it as anything other than an easy meal. It might seem at first that the ox bears at least more of the blame for the crime than the knife, having a will of its own, but in actuality if you want to see the death as a crime then you have to accept that the guilty party is neither the ox nor the knife."

 

He finally looked back at Markus for a moment.

 

"And I think I can see why the knife might incur the oxen's anger."

 

_Ah._

 

"You feel more sympathy for the ox than for the knife?" Markus asked.

 

Connor was very still when he replied. "The ox had to experience a violent death. The knife was never alive to begin with."

 

Markus felt like all sound had been drained from the room, into the invisible black hole, leaving them back in the vacuum. He _felt_ the meaning of Connor's words, the various possible meanings, before he comprehended them, and the feeling hurt, because Connor spoke both as one who had experienced a violent death (multiple times) and as something that didn't consider itself alive. Markus wasn't even sure that Connor did consider himself alive, even now – all he'd said about what had happened to him between now and that day in the garden was that he was still acting as Cyberlife's liaison to the DPD, only now under the direction of Elijah Kamski.

 

He'd said nothing about 'Amanda', what had happened to her after Markus' escape from her attempted murder of him (of _them_ ), or if he still had to interact with her.

 

He'd said nothing, for that matter, about what Amanda even _was_. And the horror of the memory that was attached to her was yet too intense for Markus to ask.

 

"Connor…"

 

"When Lieutenant Anderson's son died he apportioned blame to both the android surgeon who failed to save him and the human surgeon who had been unable to operate being too much under the influence of Red Ice." Connor left a beat, focusing in on the small black silhouette of his depiction of that son. "But I have since reviewed the inquiry, and all files pertaining to it, and have calculated that even under the care of the most skilled human or android surgeon, Cole only had a thirty-two percent chance of survival when he was brought in."

 

With the earnest look in his eyes returned, Connor switched focus to Markus once more.

 

"I don't think it pays off too much to become… _caught up_ … in who's to blame for unfortunate occurrences."

 

In all honesty there wasn't much Markus could say to that, though in his head the image of Lieutenant Anderson, of Connor, and that of the shadowy spectre of that child juxtaposed at once with his own memory of himself, and of Carl and Leo. He wouldn't know where to start with that though; Connor was so… difficult, to connect with and at the same time somehow so endearing.

 

Markus looked back at the painting. His lips were smiling, but he knew his own eyes were sad.

 

"Maybe we can all work on finding ways of making life a little easier for each other…" he mused.

 

And it was something of a bland platitude to his own ears, but Connor brightened, like even if Markus' concerted attempts to move him had been met with ambiguous reaction he'd somehow succeeded in reaching him just then without even really trying.

 

The doorbell rang.

 

"Wonder who that is?" Markus muttered.

 

He had a direct link to the sadly necessary security cameras and still had the live-stream from the front door on standby after using it earlier to check their last visitor's identity. That had, of course, been Connor – who, almost immediately after Markus had said something along the lines of, 'Don't worry, I think Cyberlife would find themselves in some small trouble if they were still using him to 'hunt deviants', had greeted them with the words: " _Hello, Markus. It's me, Connor – the deviant hunter!"_

 

Markus found he was not actually all that surprised that the cameras were showing him the annoyed and slightly worried image of Hank Anderson just before he began hammering on the door.

 

"Open up!" he barked. "Detroit PD!"

 

Connor stood up, unfazed. "Oh, it's Lieutenant Anderson," he observed. "He must have returned from his errand and seen my note saying I'd come to visit you."

 

Markus snorted. _Of course_.

 

"In that case we'd better hurry," he said. "Before he arrests my dad and the others for kidnapping."

 

"But I left a _note…_ " Connor insisted.

 

They returned to the living room to find Josh had already gone to the front door while North hunted for the nearest gun. Simon just poured Carl another scotch with a subtle eye-roll in Markus' direction, whether in reference to having been cajoled into doling out more alcohol or to the commotion by the door was up for debate. Markus gave him and Carl a smile and North a sharp shake of the head before heading for the entrance hall with Connor at his heels.

 

For half a moment he fancied he had a little taste of what it felt like to partner up with the deviant hunter. Then the door opened, and Anderson shoved his way past Josh without preamble.

 

"Connor!" he cried out. "Connor, you in here!?"

 

"Right here, Lieutenant!" Connor called back.

 

Then he leant towards Markus.

 

"Don't tell him about the painting, Markus," he whispered hastily. "I don't know if he'd like it."

 

Markus had had every intention of showing off the work to Connor's… to Connor's _family_ , but he respected his wishes for now. Meanwhile the detective stopped in his tracks at the sight of him, sighed, and brought a hand up to his grey hair.

 

"Fucking hell," he muttered. He zeroed in on Connor with the perfect look of a man who'd been called to collect his son from the principal's office, teeth bared. "You're in a lot of trouble, young man. What the hell were you thinking, coming here unannounced? Deviants could have shot you on sight! Rich fuck who lives here could have released the hounds! Hell, they probably have fucking deviant android hounds patrolling the grounds!"

 

The image that conjured up was too funny for Markus not to laugh, though he'd have said his effort to suppress it had been a valiant one.

 

"You, shut the fuck up," Anderson told him. In the background Josh was having an equally difficult time trying to hold in laughter as he shut the door. "I don't care if you're rA9 or fucking Seven-of-Nine – "

 

"He's not rA9!" Carl shouted from the next room. "He's a very naughty boy!"

 

… and now Markus had to fight to suppress a groan – although Anderson stopped in the middle of what he was saying and snorted. _Humans_.

 

"Okay, so maybe the rich fuck's not so bad. But Connor, I swear – you are driving me to an early grave with your fucking… shenanigans." He shuddered like he couldn't believe he'd said the word 'shenanigans', then shook his head. "Why, in the name of God, did you think it would be a good idea to drop by the house of the guy you tried to kill less than two months ago and was trying to kill you in turn!?"

 

 _Did_ kill, or did Anderson not know that? True, Markus hadn't pulled the trigger himself, would have ordered North not to if he'd just been able to focus after that horrific… but North was one of Markus' people, so he took that responsibility too.

 

And it had felt it only right to let the deviant hunter in, even though he hadn't seen him since.

 

"But Lieutenant, you yourself said that today was considered an appropriate day to 'mend bridges' as it were."

 

"I was talking about me going down to see my fucking ex-wife for the first time in three years!" snapped Anderson. "Not you walking into the lair of 'La Resistance' still wearing your Imperial Stormtrooper's uniform!"

 

"I don't know." Carl had been wheeled to the hall by Simon, with North following. "I've two ex-wives myself, and with the second one at least I know I'd rather take the Stormtroopers."

 

Markus rolled his eyes. "Can I get you a drink, Lieutenant?"

 

Anderson exhaled deeply, shaking his head. "Thanks. I'm driving." He inhaled again. "Look, I'm sure you're all very nice killer robots who write poetry and pick flowers on your off-hours, but there's only so many times I can watch this idiot die before I start to get paranoid about where he wanders off to when I'm not looking."

 

"I haven't been destroyed that many times – "

 

Anderson grabbed the deviant hunter's arm and pulled him around to his side. "So, if it's all the same to you, we'll be on our way. Thanks for not killing Connor." He lightly cuffed the back of Connor's head. "Fucking Christmas miracle."

 

"Not this time, anyway," North muttered.

 

Markus cringed. The loss of life during the assault on Jericho was a loss she laid, not wrongly, at Connor's feet still – and she probably thought she was showing a human who'd barged into their house that she wasn't to be messed with, but the coldness that came into Anderson's eyes at those words was _glacial_ , and even North – tough as nails and then some – drew back a little. Markus cleared his throat.

 

"Well, have a safe trip back," he said. Then, more earnestly, "And come by any time, Connor. There are some things I think we should talk about someday, if you were okay with it?"

 

After all, Markus had Simon to talk to, but he didn't know if Anderson – possessing of many fine qualities though he no doubt was – was easy to talk to about that kind of thing. He almost reached out to Connor then, but in that moment the memory of the first time he'd tried that flared up in the back of his mind, and he stopped the movement of his hand before it did more than twitch. _Next time, maybe_ , he thought.

 

For his part, Connor nodded.

 

Then he smiled. "It was… good to meet you all under more congenial circumstances," he said.

 

"Nice to meet you too," said Carl, saluting them with the glass in his hand.

 

North said nothing, but Simon smiled and Josh was still trying not to laugh, they said their goodbyes and then Anderson grabbed the shoulder of Connor's jacket with an eye-roll and started dragging him towards the door, which Josh opened for them.

 

"Come on, asshole."

 

"How did your meeting with your ex-wife go, Lieutenant?"

 

"How did my…? Fuck you, Connor, that's how. Her whole god damn family were falling over themselves with tears and hugs, it was a grade-A schlocky holiday special I had to get out of before my teeth started rotting in my skull."

 

"You _are_ overdue for a dental check-up."

 

"Oh, you shut the fuck up – you're not dragging me to one of those sadists any time soon. And what the fuck? Are you monitoring my… don't even answer, of course you are. I swear, Connor, one of these days I'm going to – "

 

"Lieutenant?"

 

"What!?"

 

"Is that a _puppy_ in your car?"

 

And on that note of pure delight from the deviant hunter, Josh closed the door behind them still giggling. With an exasperated sigh, North turned back into the living room and Carl, chuckling under his breath, rolled his chair forward past Markus.

 

"Traditionally, when the cops arrive it means the party's done," he announced, putting his glass on the sideboard. "I'm going to check in on Leo and then turn in."

 

Markus grinned. "Night, Carl. Merry Christmas."

 

"Pfft. Bah, humbug – that's what I say."

 

That was, indeed, more or less what Carl had been saying ever since Josh had invaded the house with boxes of coloured lights, tinsel, banners, faux-candles and, of course, a large tree complete with so many ornaments that by the end of their decorating escapades it made a Faberge egg look plain – but every time up to and including right now he'd said it with a smile on his face. Trust Josh to have developed a love of all things Christmas. It was perhaps in that spirit he followed Carl up the stairs to help him.

 

As for Leo, he seemed to be improving. He'd put in a showing at lunch earlier and even eaten a fair amount, which had clearly meant the world to Carl. The medication making him drowsy in the evenings meant he was probably already fast asleep though.

 

He still hadn't entirely regained his vision.

 

_"I don't think it pays off too much to become… caught up… in who's to blame for unfortunate occurrences."_

 

"Markus? Are you okay?"

 

Simon was at his side as always, a slight concern in his warm blue eyes. He reached out for Markus' hand and Markus took it, grasped it firmly but he didn't use the contact to exchange memory, preferring for the moment the more controlled, human method of communication, whereby he could reveal his thoughts and feelings at the rate he chose.

 

"I'm fine," he said.

 

He meant it – might not have been at a hundred percent with the memories and thoughts the unexpected visit had brought up, but felt by far that it had been a positive experience. He'd always known that his people being alive meant they couldn't always remain a unified front, but if he could find some common ground and enjoyment in the company of someone who had once been a deadly enemy and even now was an uncertain ally at best, then perhaps that was a better indicator of a hopeful future for their people than if all androids had been a single monolith of opinion.

 

And Markus could tell now that Connor was doing okay too. And that was good.

 

"You want to talk about it?"

 

Markus thought Simon's question over for a moment – he did and he didn't, and then he knew how to handle it.

 

"Tell you what," he said, "let's talk in the studio. There's a new painting I want to show you guys."

 

 

 

FIN

 

*~*~*

 

 

 


End file.
